Infographic of the Day: Where Do NYC Foodies Spend Their Dough?

Eating out is a way of life in New York City. But where do people spend their money, and how much do they shell out? In short: Expensive, old-timey places, and more money than you expected.

The financial site Bundle — which is similar to Mint.com — has provided Co.Design with some exclusive infographics that break down the average monthly restaurant spending by New Yorkers from every neighborhood. What's more, the charts also look at the restaurants that inspired the most loyalty among patrons.

Here's a summary of New York's neighborhoods. The darker it is, the higher the average monthly restaurant spend is:

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The detailed maps of the boroughs get even more interesting. Here, you see Manhattan. The top 10% of restaurant spenders drop an average of $2,247 every month eating out. The median is a whopping $447. If you're not good at math, that amounts to $26,964 and $5,364 a year. Upper East Siders spend the most money of any group — you can almost hear those moneybags pushing around $40 Caesar salads with their forks. (For comparison's sake San Franciscan's using Mint — surely one of the richest demographics in the world, spend on average about $800 a month on food AND eating out.)

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On the left, you can see the restaurants which have the most "loyalty" — an imprecise metric, determined by the percent of a restaurant client's total dining-out spending that was dropped there. I say imprecise because you'll see that places such as Per Se or Le Bernardin or Daniel, some of the most expensive in the city, command very high loyalty scores. That's probably due in part to the fact that when people go there, they're really splurging. A better indication of the haunts of restaurant fiends is probably the spending notch right below.

Meanwhile, here's the same charts for Brooklyn and Queens:

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Not enough for you? Well, all this data is drawn from a Bundle's Restaurant Recommender, a superb new tool which aims to be the Pandora of restaurants. You simply type in a restaurant name, and it spits out the other places frequented by people who also like that joint. A perfect way of getting out of your old habits, which sticking to your comfort zone.